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EnGenius ESR9850

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flamaest

Regular Contributor
Geez, this thing looks amazing...

If this unit lives up to all the hype, this unit will give Netgear and Dlink a run for their money.

F.
 
Engenius as a company makes a lot of well engineered products, but are relatively unknown.

After reading their spec sheets and examining what little reviews there were on them, I got a dual band 7750 reviewed briefly here, and it does give tough competition not because its speed is faster, its more in the ballpark of its competitors, but its trouble free plug and play install and 1/3 to 1/2 their competitor's prices at most.

I stream 1080p movies with it easily.

http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showpost.php?p=17631&postcount=6

Note that graphs on sustained throughput.

It meets many of the ideals I need in an AP+router as in my signature, now lets see if it lasts long. It has the same 5GHz radio chipset, Ralink RTL3052, as the 9850, and I agree with SNB critique of its menu items 100%, I had the same pros and cons.

SNB has already released part of the AP throughput, and its looking slow. The story unfolds!
 
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Easily a bang for buck, speedy router, good AP

Based on SNB test, I think the 9850 offers quite a bang for buck:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/images/charts/cached_linechart_69_797_844_824.jpg


Comparing the fastest router on the panel D-685, and the easiest one to use by reputation Apple's dual band Airport, for the 2 GHz band the Engenius not only holds its own, but know it costs $50 versus Dlink's $200 and Apple's $180.

I cannot personally state its ease of use, but await Mr. Higgins' review of his installation experience. I found the related model ESR7750 a plug and play install.
 
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I cannot personally state its ease of use, but await Mr. Higgins' review of his installation experience. I found the related model ESR7750 a plug and play install.
"Mr. Higgins" had no problem installing, but I've used so many of these things that installation isn't really an issue.

The review will be rather short since you already have performance info and functional details. Basically, its wired routing is extremely fast and supposedly handles 19000 sessions (EnGenius is going to send me proof of this since I can't test it.) Wireless is fast and can exceed 100 Mbps for multiple connections, not single. But performance falloff with range is higher than other products I've seen. So it'll give you fast wireless if you have a good signal, but has slightly lower range than many products.

Seems like a good deal for a single-band N router. But support will be the weak point.
 
"Mr. Higgins" had no problem installing, but I've used so many of these things that installation isn't really an issue.

The review will be rather short since you already have performance info and functional details. Basically, its wired routing is extremely fast and supposedly handles 19000 sessions (EnGenius is going to send me proof of this since I can't test it.) Wireless is fast and can exceed 100 Mbps for multiple connections, not single. But performance falloff with range is higher than other products I've seen. So it'll give you fast wireless if you have a good signal, but has slightly lower range than many products.

Seems like a good deal for a single-band N router. But support will be the weak point.

Thanks for those tidbits, I would say exactly the same for the 7750. Very competent as a dual band router, but one should anticipate being on your own for most tech support.

A graph of your throughput results shows while it does fall off, it does better than the Airport and still usable farther than the top rated DIR-685.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/images/charts/cached_linechart_69_797_844_824.jpg
 
WAN-PPTP stability&performance

Are there any chances to see 9850 tested with WAN×PPTP? Thanks.
 
Jumbo Frames

I really appreciate the reviews on SNB, and I have been particularly interested in this router. The review states, "EnGenius doesn't say whether the 9850's switch supports jumbo frames. But when I checked by running an IxChariot test with 4k jumbos, it ran just fine. So, I'm guessing that up to 9K jumbo frames will work just fine."

I decided to give Engenius a call @ their technical support number (888-735-7888), and I asked if jumbo frames were supported and if so what size. The response was that the ESR9850 does not support jumbo frames. Now I don't know who is correct, but given that the manual doesn't state a size makes me think that they do not. I wish I knew.
 
I really enjoyed this report. I'm also happy they sent you that tool to verify it can take 19000 separate connections, which is effectively "infinity" for home users.

Engenius/Senao is such an underdog in the US market that we as consumers are missing out on a fine cost/benefit device, much better engineering than market leaders in AP-routers in the USA.

http://news.zdnet.com/i/ne/p/charts/021004wifi_chart.gif

Regarding your comment that you'll review the ESR-7750, I'd love to see that. There are 2 other reviews beyond Amazon's I've found with technical detail, but I believe your methods and an extensive database of devices tested thereby, will best characterize the 7750's performance objectively, more than anyone else on the net.

http://www.epinions.com/review/Enge...Dual_band_Wirelessrouter/content_503629123204

http://www.keenansystems.com/engenius_esr7550_review.htm
 
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Mr. Higgins,
Could you please make a tool to test max session limit available for download somewhere?
Developer's page is no longer available, and author more than likely wouldn't mind since tool was distributed as freeware.
Thanks!
 
I decided to give Engenius a call @ their technical support number (888-735-7888), and I asked if jumbo frames were supported and if so what size. The response was that the ESR9850 does not support jumbo frames. Now I don't know who is correct, but given that the manual doesn't state a size makes me think that they do not. I wish I knew.
I've verified with EnGenius (Senao) that the ESR9850 does support up to 9K jumbo frames. But they are not officially specified / supported.
 
Mr. Higgins,
Could you please make a tool to test max session limit available for download somewhere?
Developer's page is no longer available, and author more than likely wouldn't mind since tool was distributed as freeware.
Thanks!
Good idea. When I get the How We Test Routers article up, I'll post the downloads there.
 
Yea, their dual-band router looks like a good affordable alternative to Netgear's WNDR3700...can't wait to see where that one stacks up performance-wise.
 
Hello,
what is known about WAN-LAN thoughput of ESR9850 on the 10/100Mbit network? Does it drops down to ~65Mbits or it stays at ~100Mbit/s? Thank U
 
Hello,
what is known about WAN-LAN thoughput of ESR9850 on the 10/100Mbit network? Does it drops down to ~65Mbits or it stays at ~100Mbit/s? Thank U
It would of course be limited to 100 Mbps speed, which would be in the 90 Mbps range. This wouldn't matter in practical use unless your ISP connection is > 100 Mbps.
 
My ISP connection is 100M, in real ~94M (tested on internet sppedometers). I asked about throughput on 100M network because I was in doubt will ESR 9850 give 100Mbit throughput on 100M network, because as I understand i.e. frequency is different for 100Mbit and 1Gbit networks. Hasn't it no influence to speed?
 
Thank you for the max. session test tool!
I just tested a Patton Smartnode 4600 voip router: 45.500 sessions.
Waiting to be tested:
Patton Smartnode 4552 (unused voip router)
Cisco 7206VXR with NPE-1G / 1GB RAM (my lab router)
Cisco 1841 with 384 MB RAM (my current router)
Juniper SRX210 with 512MB RAM (probably my next router)
Linksys WRT54G2 (just laying around)
Routerboard RB600A (my accesspoint)

Not exactly consumer-grade, but still nice for comparison.
I will post the results soon.
 
I made a stupid mistake... I followed your testing example by using the same UDP starting port (20000). The reason it tested +/- 45500 connections is the port number limit of 65535. When starting at port 20000, this limit is reached after 45500 connections.
To overcome this problem I probably should setup several clients and/or servers.
 
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